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The Broadcom switching OS running on HP's Moonshot 45G and 180G switches can do a neat trick
1 that I haven't seen on other platforms.
Background: LACP-IndividualThe trick revolves around interfaces that are sometimes aggregated, and sometimes run as individuals. Lots of platforms don't support this behavior. On those platforms, if an interface is configured to attempt aggregation but doesn't receive LACP PDUs, the interface won't forward traffic at all. Less broken platforms make this behavior
configurable or have some goofy
in-between mode which allows one member of the aggregation to forward traffic.
If the Moonshot were saddled with one of these broken
2 switching OSes, we'd be in a real pickle: Moonshot cartridges (my m300s, anyway)
require PXE in order to become operational, and PXE runs in the option ROM of an
individual network interface. Even if that interface could form an one-member aggregation, it wouldn't be able to coordinate its operation with the other interface, and neither of their LACP speaker IDs would match the one chosen by the operating system that eventually gets loaded.
I suppose we could change the switch configuration: Add and remove individual interfaces from aggregations depending on the mode required by the
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